February 7th:
8:50 PM Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery – “Into The Brain”
Throughout its history, surgery has been brutal, bloody and very dangerous – and in no area of the body has it been more frightening than the brain. Just over 100 years ago, cutting into the brain was a terrifying prospect for both patient and surgeon; they could expect the result to be the surgeon bloodied and defeated, the patient dead. From freak accidents involving crowbars through the skull to notorious lobotomies with ice-picks, this programme reveals how, through mishap and misadventure, brain surgery has become the life-saving discipline it is today.

February 14th:
8:00 PM Human Senses – “Smell/Taste”
This sensory romp around the globe goes in search of the biological roots of our senses to uncover the reasons why particular sights, sounds, smells and tastes have such powerful effects on us. How do we manage to block out intense pain? How does our sense of balance keep working under the most extreme conditions? Live action combined with special effects creates incredible imagery to convey the ‘feeling’ of how our senses work. As an alarm bell goes off, we ‘see’ the noise, slowed down thousands of times. Ripples of sound roll towards us; we spin around and follow a sound wave as it travels into the dark outer ear canal. This epiosde goes in search of the most disgusting and the most attractive smells, and examines why humans eat such a range of diverse tasting dishes.

8:50 PM Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery – “Bleeding Hearts”
The development of heart surgery produced some of the most reckless, experiments in the whole history of surgery. With a family history of heart problems, Michael Mosley takes a personal interest in these surgical pioneers who teetered on the scalpel-edge between saviour and executioner. Michael has a go at heart surgery, meets a man with no heartbeat and witnesses the latest breathtaking operation – where the patient is cooled until their brain stops and has all of their blood sucked out.

February 21st:
8:00 PM Human Senses – “Hearing/Balance”8:50 PM Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery – “Spare Parts”
These days transplant surgery saves thousands of lives every year and almost everything can be replaced: your heart, your lungs, your liver, your eyes, even your hands and face. But in the beginning transplants didn’t cure, they killed, because surgeons didn’t understand that they were taking on one of the most efficient killing systems we know of – the human immune system. This episode traces the story of transplant surgery from a 19th-century neo-Nazi to the latest miraculous life- and limb-saving operations.

February 28th:
8:00 PM Human Senses – “Touch/Vision”8:50 PM Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery – “Fixing Faces”
Plastic surgery is not a modern phenomenon. It started over 400 years ago with a spate of botched nose jobs, so badly engineered that the nose would fall off if the wind blew too hard. Since then, surgeons have been entranced with the idea that not only could they fix the body, but now they could even fix our sense of self-esteem. From DIY face-lifts to heroic wartime reconstructive surgery, Michael Mosely undergoes 16th-century bondage and 21st-century botox in his journey to trace the bizarre history of plastic surgery.